"david.lloyd(a)jboss.com" wrote : Actually one more question - are the locks held when doing auto-wiring and injection and that sort of thing? | Yup, a read lock. "david.lloyd(a)jboss.com" wrote : | In other words, if I have beans A and B, and I want a property from A to be injected into B, will the same lock be held that is used to change states during the injection? I'm concerned more about memory visibility than locking here. Nope. We try to unlock/re-lock things as much as possible, to not keep things in waiting for unnecessary reasons. But we do make sure things are consistent, applying write/read locks where needed. See AbstractController.incrementState for such unlocking usage. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4130884#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...